Driftmetal (4 page)

“Where are you taking me?” I called up.

The grav engines were roaring and the nearflow was
wailing so loud I don’t think they heard me, but I saw why they’d
been in such a hurry to leave. Captain Kupfer and his law-loving
super troupe were coming down through the clouds, converging on the
beacon’s coordinates.

As much as these biker primies were pissing me off,
it turned out they were also my heroes. They’d saved me from the
Civs in the nick of time.
Fellow Civ-haters. We must be on the
same team
, I realized. I couldn’t tell whether the Civ Captain
and his goons had spotted us, but I vowed that if I got away, it
would be the first of many, many times I’d give Captain Kupfer a
good screwing over. I’d get started on keeping that vow as soon as
I got myself fixed up.

In the meantime, the primies were taking me back to
their place. I get that a lot. Everyone I meet wants to take me
back to their place. Usually to kill me. The primies’ place was a
drift-town like none I’d ever seen before. To be more specific, it
wasn’t a drift-town.

It was a
grav city
. And it was full of
primies.

I could see the Churn hiccupping below as we passed
through the cloaking field, a gigantic protective bubble that
encased the city. My jaw dropped halfway to the Churn when I saw
that the
entire city
was suspended on a gravstone bed. The
land mass beneath it looked like any other drift-town, giant stone
roots hanging off the bottom like a mountain flipped upside down,
except that
it wasn’t drifting
.

A network of polarized rods was holding it in place,
about a quarter-mile above the surface. Neither the Churn’s
upheavals nor the brash, keening winds of the nearflow did anything
to shift the city from its place. Even when they set me down on a
shaggy carpet of grass in a lush green field, I felt no movement or
tilt.

My first thought when I entered the city was to
wonder if there were a hammer and chisel I’d overlooked in one of
the pockets of my webgear. The amount of gravstone buried in the
bedrock below this city was worth more than I could spend in a
hundred lifetimes. The biker primies must’ve known there would be
gold gleaming in my eyes, because they slapped a pair of steel
wristbands on me as soon as we landed. I was resistant to the idea
at first, until they offered to drop me back where they’d found me.
Whenever I moved my hands more than about six inches apart, the
magnets in the wristbands activated, snapping them back together
with a painful
clack
. The device also gave me a nice little
shock for my trouble.

The dome of crackling bluish-white energy above us
looked a lot like the one the primie had generated from his
hoverbike. Whenever a floater or a clod hit the dome, it glanced
away as though it had struck a solid object, making almost no
sound. I could feel a faint breeze and I knew the barrier was
filtering the air, as clean and breathable as it was way up in the
stream.

The two primies took off their masks and caught
their breath. One had long, medium-brown hair and a beard; the
other’s hair was short, dark and curly, and he was clean-shaven.
Both were younger than I was at the time, though I was
better-looking than both of them put together.

“Muller Jakes,” I said by way of introduction. I
held out a hand and got my first dick-tickling shockwave of pain,
complements of my wristbands.

They both laughed at me. The bearded wonder said,
“I’m Clinton Vilaris, and this is Gareth Blaylocke.”

“And this… is Pyras,” Blaylocke said, waving a
hand.

“Never heard of it,” I said, still recovering. “You
live
here?”

Pyras looked sparkling-new, its sculpted white
curves towering above gothic arches, like a scale replica of an
ancient metropolis realized in styrofoam. Water cascaded down
echelons of thick garden greenery, a maze of winding staircases and
meandering walkways in smooth marble.

“You sound impressed,” said Vilaris, scratching the
beard. “Best part is, hardly anybody in the stream knows we’re
here.”

What the crap
, I thought, a little jealous.
This place is nicer than most drift-towns… and it’s completely
hidden?
After I was done thinking it, I said it.

“Not completely. We release the locks and move the
city around from time to time. Just for safety’s sake. It’s not
that nobody knows we exist. It’s that we make ourselves hard to
find.”

My jaw was still hanging open. “How long?”

“Seven and a half inches,” Blaylocke said.

Vilaris made a face at him. “Not likely.” Then to
me, he said, “A hundred and eighty-two years.”

“You’re kidding me. It looks brand-new.”

I liked the thought of being somewhere the Civs
couldn’t find me. That thought alone made me want to stay a while.
It was hard to believe there was a thing in the world the Civs
hadn’t gotten their grubby mitts all over. Being there gave me a
sense of peace I hadn’t felt in a long time. It was like having my
own secret hideout and knowing it would last forever.

“We’re standing on a magnetic island veined with
several thousand tons of the most valuable element in the world,
and you’re doubting how we keep the place up?”

“I’m not doubting how you keep it up,” I said. “I’m
doubting how you keep it hidden. And why me? Why did you bring me
in here and show me all this? I’m a few capers away from being the
most wanted outlaw in the stream. I’d sell you out for a warm meal
and a cot to sleep on right now.”

“We have both, as it happens, and you don’t have to
sell anyone out to get them.”

“Good, I’m starved.”

They took me past blocks of the greenest landscaping
I’ve ever stepped on, introduced me to a dozen other primies whose
names I forgot seconds after hearing them, and brought me to a
building they called the Kingsholme. Judging by the look of it, I
assumed it was a cathedral or a library. Once we’d ascended the
grand limestone steps and come through the towering entryway, an
ornate affair of burnished brass inlaid with silver etchings, I
found myself standing in an echoing stone hall with arched
ceilings. A row of floating pedestals ran down either side of the
room, displaying illuminated objects I could only assume held
cultural significance to the city’s residents. The pedestals were
carved from dark stone marbled with exposed veins of
driftmetal.

“This is great. Just, really great. Can we eat now?”
I said.

Blaylocke was confused. “Wait. You eat food?”

“Are you dumb?” I said, incredulous. “What did you
think, techsouls drank motor oil and ate roofing nails?”

The two primies shared a glance and burst out
laughing.

“I swear, you guys…”

“Relax. We’re messing with you,” Vilaris said
between chuckles. “Turns out you can’t take a joke. I like that
about you, though. It’s more fun that way.”

So I was a little uptight, being that I was
suffering from a distinct lack of tech and my parents had just
tried to serve me to the Civs on a silver platter. I wasn’t feeling
too good in the flesh department, either. I’d been shot, at least
twice. Not to mention my whole body was gashed and bruised from
falling thousands of feet through a cloud of floaters and landing
in a section of Churn that was about as soft as a bathtub full of
razorblades.

They led me down the hall and through the doors at
the far end. A normal-sized hallway stretched from left to right.
We veered left, then through a door, down another hall and past a
large dining space furnished with a dozen pristine table settings.
Through a swinging door with a circular plexiglass window, I was
greeted by the sounds and smells of industrial cooking.

“Three bowls of gruel with a side of slop,” Vilaris
shouted.

The kitchen was a hurricane of white cotton twill
and stainless steel, five in number. Their leader, a man as portly
in stature as he was prodigious in toque, rapped the counter
repeatedly with a metal ladle and shoved it in our direction. An
underling obeyed, filling three bowls and carrying the tray past us
into the dining room. Vilaris and Blaylocke followed him. I
followed them. I was shoveling down spoonfuls of the tastiest gruel
I’d had in days when the head chef came out to greet us, wiping
chubby hands on an apron splotched with red-orange stains.

“Sheldon McLean, at your service,” he said with a
slight bow.

I stopped to cast him a sideways glance, then
mumbled, “If you say so,” between spoonfuls.

“I apologize for the slow service,” said the
chef.

Blaylocke waved away the apology. “Nonsense. You
guys are strapped down tight in there. You should have a staff
twice as big for the job you do.”

Sheldon brightened, chins tightening beneath his
five o’clock shadow. “We get by,” he admitted with a certain note
of pride. “How are things out there today?”

Vilaris shrugged. “Thick. Windy. Dangerous. The
u’she.”

I slurped the last dregs of my soup as though I were
a condemned man enjoying his final meal, then let the bowl spin to
rest on the table. To Sheldon’s credit, he didn’t bat an eye while
the bowl
wub-wub-wubbed
to a halt.

“What is this place?” I asked, studying the
ceilings.

“Kingsholme? It’s the closest thing we have to a
city hall. Pyras’s center of arts and culture.”

“So you guys can come in here and get free food
whenever you want?”

Sheldon answered on their behalf, flashing a smile.
“We’re always happy to feed the City Watch and their friends.”

“
Friends?
” I said. “I wouldn’t go that far.”
I showed him my wristbands.

“It’s a formality,” Vilaris explained. “We’re taking
him to see the Innovators.”

“News to me,” I said.

“Maybe you should see a doctor as well,” said the
chef, no doubt having noticed my wounds.

“It looks worse than it is,” I said. I tapped my
synthetic eye with a fingernail.
Tink-tink
.

Sheldon’s expression darkened. “Is he allowed in
here?”

“We’ve reported it to the council already,” Vilaris
said. “There’s a reason for all this.”

“Ah.” The chef gave a nod of sudden understanding.
“My apologies. I didn’t realize.”

“Shel, ol’ buddy,” I said, “think nothing of
it.”

When you’re a techsoul, you live without
discrimination except in the presence of primies. Redbloods think
they’re better than you because they don’t rust. They act like you
don’t both eat and crap the same. Blaylocke had had me there for a
second with his little ‘
You eat food?’
ruse, but in truth he
knew as little about what it meant to be a techsoul as all the
other primies.

The chef took his leave after a moment of
uncomfortable silence. Vilaris and Blaylocke thanked him for
another fine meal. Sheldon insisted that it was hardly a meal and
no trouble at all. Another series of hallways took us to a set of
heavy wooden doors with riveted brass plating. The plaque on the
wall read:

Department of Innovation

Prof. Dr. E. Chester Wheatley

Master Gadgeteer and Technotherapist-in-Chief

Technotherapist?
I wondered. Vilaris magicked
a steel key from his jacket and unlocked the door. The room beyond
might as well have been in a basement for all its lack of windows,
exposed brick walls lit by the orange warmth of coal furnaces and
the cold white outbursts of blowtorches shedding sparks. I counted
no fewer than ten men at work, each the picture of focus, armed
with mallet and saw and rivet gun, encircling the skeletons of
half-finished chassis like tribal hunters ganging up on big game.
The workshop was a graveyard of gears, flywheels, pressure gauges,
dynamos and pipes, all piled in corners, stacked on steel shelving
units, and strewn about the floor.

Nobody noticed us. Vilaris had to send Blaylocke to
fetch the guy whose name was on the plaque outside the door. What
I’d expected to be some wizened old man was actually a guy about my
age, a strapping youth bound in an exoskeleton of gleaming metal. A
veil of black hair hung into his face, stringy-damp with sweat.
When he removed his goggles they left wide pink circles in the skin
around dark, tired eyes. I was smitten. If there was a man in this
city who it could benefit me to befriend, this was that man.

“Gareth, Clint, good to see you. Chester Wheatley,”
he told me, thrusting out a greasy palm.

I took it in both of mine. “Muller, Muller Jakes,” I
said, shaking his whole arm vigorously. “What’s this you’re working
on?”

He turned the upper half of his body to look,
stiff-necked in his metal scaffolding. “Oh, that, just a new idea.
My grandest idea yet. As they all are. Very secretive, you know.
Everything we do here is very secretive.”

And yet we walked right in and no one batted an
eye
, I almost said. His secret project looked to be something
meant for flight—a light, winged frame about the size of a large
dog, its internal mechanisms spinning.

“It’s… magnificent,” I said. “Really, I mean
that.”

Creases appeared in the skin around Chester’s eyes.
I like to think he would’ve stood a little taller if he’d had that
much postural freedom. “You think so?”

“Without a doubt. Clean lines, efficient machinery,
thoughtful design. You’ve really taken this to a whole new level.
It’s by far the most advanced model I’ve ever seen.”

Chester was confused. “The most advanced… but this
is my own design. Where could you have seen anything like it
before?”

“Listen, Chaz. Walk with me.” I would’ve put an arm
around him if not for the wristbands. Instead I took him by the
shoulders and guided him away from Vilaris and Blaylocke. “I know
you work hard. I can tell you’re a brilliant man. Lots of great
ideas have taken shape here, haven’t they? Yeah. This place is so
full of dreams. So—” I paused for effect and panned my hands over
the room, “—so…
pregnant
, with possibility. This is a place
where dreams come alive. I can
smell
the inspiration.” I
could smell something, but inspiration wasn’t it. “You have a
gift,” I said, looking him straight in the eye, “and you’re wasting
it.”